“Justice
is Served!”, fired by a gunshot, is how it all began. My first
encounter with the villain eventually known as Scourge was in Thing
No. 24, a healthy portion of which is reprinted in the beginning of
this book. This book is what I call a “Jeph York special”,
meaning that Jeph York of Marvel pored over countless comic books,
cataloging incidents that tied into the larger whole of the story. He
takes pages, in a virtual razor blade style, slices them out of
various titles where the villain would appear, and collates them into
a cohesive, fully explained introduction. Scourge would pop in the
middle of any title, and you'd see a villain, i.e. the Human Fly,
vowing to get Spider-Man, but before he could even so much as escape,
Scourge would plug him and shout Justice is served!

This
happened for a year or so before finally being addressed in the pages
of Captain America and the Amazing Spider-Man. I read
the ASM issue at the time, but never got to know the nuts and bolts
of the villain. This book handily answers any and all questions one
could possibly have about Scourge.

The
US Agent (whom I'll go more in depth about in my forthcoming review
of Captain America: The Captain TPB) ends up locking horns
with Scourge over the course of his mini-series.

Mark
Gruenwald handles the majority of the scripts in this book.
Gruenwald's a solid writer, able to build things to a boil before
dashing off into a completely different direction. I loved all of the
twists and turns. A good writer can make or break a book.

M.C.
Wyman's artwork on the US Agent mini-series was surprisingly good. I
had never heard of him/her, and found the artwork to be fluid and
storytelling clear and concise. All of the artwork in this book was
decent, and for the time these issues were originally published,
above average.

This
is an excellent package overall, and reads remarkably well. I missed
out on Cap during the '80s, but am making up for lost time now.

The
OCD zone- This has the same nice, dull matte finish coated stock
as Marvel's Classic and softcover Masterworks lines of
trade paperbacks. This is my favorite paper stock currently being
used by Marvel for softcovers, and works really well for presenting
vintage material. It reads and feels comic book-y without feeling
like cheap pulp paper.

Join
the cause page if you want make sure that DC keeps up the recent good
work on their hardcovers. This group is a watchdog organization
dedicated to top notch production values in collected editions.

I read (REread, as I had all of the original issues as a kid...) this a while back, and enjoyed it a great deal. THE CAPTAIN, however, I had to put down unfinished...It just went on and on and on...I just couldn't take it anymore.BTW, did you catch the misspelled word on the cover? How Marvel let that one slip, I'll never know.